Adam Ouston, Mine

- Adam Ouston has written a thoroughly engrossing novel. Magical, deep and an absolute joy to read. 

- Ouston’s focus is on men at the extremes. His first novel Waypoints, published four years ago (which I reviewed here), explored the same theme. 

- An old man in his late seventies, a poet and retired academic, falls down a mine shaft in Northwest Tasmania. He’s severely injured, and can't see a way out. He’s desperate for water and to relieve his pain by moving. But if he sucks the drip near him will he be poisoned? But he's dying of thirst so is it worth the risk? He reflects on his life, his passions, and his deceased friend the journalist who shared his anger at the world. The old man attended his funeral service and was unimpressed by the superficiality of it, especially the comments by friends and colleagues.The tepid mundanity of it angered him. 

-  What sort of person emerges from his reflections, memories and stories? An angry, unhappy one. A man with a ‘natural tendency to understatement and rumination’. A university lecturer who loved the word ‘bullshit’. His students did too. He was interested ‘in getting to the bottom of things’. Tasmania was ‘a cartography of sighs’ and nature a ‘gnashing machine of time’. 'It could be said he'd long been in possession of an issue with authority...protesting pulp mills, dams, deforestation, and the grubby practices of governing bodies, good old-fashioned Tasmanian dissent facing off against good old-fashioned Tasmanian corruption...'

- The novel is one long sentence of 278 pages. The man's thoughts, registered in poetic and fluid prose, are winding and loose, and glide smoothly in and out of the major events in his long life. The reader can’t help but be captivated by this man and his magnificent descriptions of nature and its wild glory. 

- As for the men 'in extremis', We're immersed in the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company and its ‘secrets, half-truths and straight up lies’. Copper mining was the obsession a century ago and the mining boom continued, with its smelters and railroads. '...it was staggering what some people did and allowed to be done to something so precious, something so beautiful, so meaningful...he could not fathom the irrespressible greed...how could it be that greed was the most robust condition? not love or lust or ambition, but greed...'. 

- We're reminded of the tragic story of the research expedition deep into the Antarctic by Sir Douglas Mawson over a century ago, and the subsequent missions by ships to the icebergs to rescue ships and crews, and confront illegal whale hunters. The old man was on one of them, the Aurora. 

- The early explorers of the 16/17/18th centuries believed there must have been a  southern landmass with ‘fifty million souls’ or so. Scottish geographer Alexander Dalrymple was certain, and the British were determined to explore it. 

- We're taken deep into the detail of the disaster of the North Mt Lyell mine in 1912. There were dangerous tunnel collapses, fires, choking black smoke and poisonous carbon monoxide. And no alarm system, and the cage got stuck. Dozens of men, some 1000 feet underground, lost their lives despite the bravery of rescuers who did all they could. And many more suffered from illnesses related to coughing and breathing for the rest of their truncated lives. The author absolutely immerses us in this horror. 

- 'For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror' (Rilke). The novel ends with the old man thinking about 'the nature of evil, the emptiness of evil, the way it can lurk in beauty or come dressed as beauty...' And he thinks about the ship Aurora and its crew and passengers trapped in the Antarctic ice, forever.